Neuromarketing, Brainfluence and Growing Your Practice

Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Bob Hoffman from The Masters Circle Global, and I am so happy you’re getting to watch this interview and podcast with someone you may or may not have ever heard of before, but someone you’re never gonna forget. Today, our guest is Roger Dooley, who’s one of the world’s leading experts, maybe the world’s leading expert in friction, how to avoid it, neural marketing and a whole bunch of other really cool things you must learn about if you’re even remotely interested in growing your persuasion and influence and practice and getting patients to be compliant. Welcome on today, Roger. I’m so happy you made the time for us.

Well, thanks Bob, and thanks for that great introduction. I will try and live up to it as much as I can.

Uh, thank you so much. I’m not worried about you, believe me. So I’m curious, you know, I read your, one of your books called Friction multiple times. I teach from it, I reference it all the time. Uh, members of The Masters Circle Global, who are now looking for the points of friction making the invisible visible, are making great strides. It’s simplifying their practice, making their practice more efficient, becoming more persuasive in their communication. And I have to tell you, I owe all of that to you. Um, for people watching this, I’m gonna certainly recommend you get Roger’s book called Friction. He’s gonna be talking about another book in just a moment as well. But I’m curious, Roger, how did a guy like you with a degree in chemical engineering become the top global influencer on neuromarketing?

That’s a strange story, and we don’t have time, uh, for anything but the condensed version, Bob, but I basically, I did study as an engineer. I got a business degree along the way, and, uh, very quickly moved out of engineering into project management than product management with more of a marketing emphasis. And when I was 30, I was in charge of corporate strategy for a Fortune 1000 company. Uh, and that was pretty much, uh, my ideal gig, particularly for that age. Uh, it was, it was fantastic. I always saw myself as rising the corporate ranks, uh, and then got bit by the entrepreneurial bug and bailed out to co-found a direct marketing business in the early days of home computers. And after that, it was pretty much an entrepreneurial career. Uh, founded multiple businesses along the way, or co-founded multiple businesses. One of those was College Confidential, which was, and it may still be today, I haven’t been following it.

Uh, uh, the leading website for college bound students and parents. And at, I know at, uh, one point we had higher traffic than college board did. So, uh, we sold that business in oh eight to, uh, part of the Daily Mail group. Uh, now while that was going on, I was doing other little startupy things. Uh, I bought a domain called Neuroscience Marketing, which I thought was, I saw those two fields coming together. Didn’t know what, what I was gonna do with that. But, uh, started writing about, uh, the then nascent field of neuromarketing people using the tools of neuroscience to understand, uh, customer reactions, to ads, to content, to environments and such. Uh, and, uh, that got traction and more traction that I really started making that a significant focus of my work, uh, putting out more content. Uh, eventually my first book, brain Fluence came out, which was a sort of distillation of some of that information on how to use, uh, neuroscience and behavioral science to market better. Uh, and, uh, it’s pretty much been continuing that way ever since. Uh, these days. Uh, I spread the word primarily by, uh, speaking, which I’m looking forward to speaking at your event, Bob. Uh, and continuing to write, uh, both on my blog, uh, publishing my podcast, which often features interviews with thought leaders and leading scientists and leading marketers and others, uh, and also a column at forbes.com.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Uh, you’ve had a storied career, but obviously you had a direction, but the, the universe took you for a ride and you jumped on board, didn’t you?

Well, you know, people have these master plans for, uh, life, uh, uh, you know, really you have to adapt to circumstances and react to opportunities. I think the, probably many of the great entrepreneurial stories, uh, from business history are partly happenstance where somebody was in the right place at the right time, yes, and throughout whatever their previous plan was to pursue this new opportunity.

Beautiful, beautiful. Now, the whole term, neuro marketing really resonated deeply with me. Uh, we as a company have been teaching what we call brain-based chiropractic for well over a decade kind of shifting from pain to brain, shifting from bone to brain. We, we literally had to create a whole new model of chiropractic practice with new communication strategies, new finances, new onboarding of the new patient, etc. So almost anything in the world of neurology interests me, and you’re right, this merger of neurology and how the brain, um, functions and how people are influenced, and using that as a marketing tool to have more persuasion and more influence how other people think and behave. To me, just, it resonated very deeply with me, and I’m sure it’s gonna resonate very deeply with all the doctors and all the Cass that are in the audience during SuperConference, which is October 5, 6 & 7 in Buckhead, Georgia. You are one of our, uh, speakers. You’re our keynote speaker. We’re so honored to have you there. Um, frankly, we see it as a blessing that you’re gonna be presenting about Brainfluence, about neuromarketing, about friction in a practice. Uh, share with us a little bit, just a little bit as a teaser on what you’re gonna be talking about at SuperConference October 5th-7th. Well,

I think that there, there’s a lot of things I could talk about, but I think that probably, uh, the most significant message right now is the effect that effort has on human behavior. Uh, according to Nobel Prize winner or Daniel Kahneman, there’s a law of leased effort that applies to both cognitive, uh, and physical exertion. And this, he says people will gravitate to the least demanding path. And despite that, uh, not just, uh, people in the medical industry, but people across all industries underestimate that power. Not everybody, uh, Jeff Bezos, uh, at Amazon has built Amazon around being customer centric and making things as easy as possible, as effortless as possible for customers. Uh, whether it’s one click ordering, frustration, free packaging, super easy returns. And lemme tell you, I spent years in the direct marketing and mail order business, uh, just before e-commerce took off.

Uh, and one thing that both mail order companies and e-commerce marketers hate are returns. They’re very expensive. People try and discourage returns. They make it difficult. They make you get an authorization. They make you package up whatever you, uh, bought, uh, yourself, and so on and so on, because they know that that added friction will reduce the number of returns they get. Jeff Bezos has done the opposite. He’s made it super easy to return stuff, which gives people the confidence to order something, even if they’re not quite sure. They know that they can, uh, get it from Amazon. So, but I mean, to me, uh, effort governs so much, uh, and there’s huge amount of research on how it changes loyalty, customer loyalty, patient loyalty. If, uh, this is something that’s so, uh, sort of invisible, uh, people think, well, we wanna delight our customers in some way, or patients we wanna surprise them and delight them.

Uh, we want to, uh, do these other things, uh, to make them be loyal, put in some kind of loyalty program where, uh, repeat visits get a discount or maybe something else or some kind of an award. Uh, but it turns out, according to research from Gartner, that loyalty is primarily governed by effort, or at least it’s a huge determinant, uh, of loyalty. And customers who have a high effort experience are much, much, much, 10 times more likely to be disloyal than customers who had a low effort experience. And I’m not sure that there is exactly corresponding, uh, uh, data for, um, uh, patient experience, but I’m sure that the same rules apply because it’s, it’s basic human nature.

I totally agree. In fact, when I take your work and I try to apply it to some of our teaching and some of our coaching with our members, I use Amazon as perhaps the most obvious, um, business model. That is a no friction model. You know, they know what you want before you know what you want, it, it’s, it really is terrific. And in some cases, if it’s not ex overly expensive, they won’t even ask you to return it. They’ll ask you to donate it or just get rid of it. Uh, they have made the process so friction free, which is part of their success, a huge part of their success, and you’re spot on. Um, so I, I really appreciate that. Uh, again, Roger, I know how busy you are. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I hope you captured the attention of the people watching and listening to this.

I hope the people watching and listening to this will do themselves a colossal favor and get themselves registered to come to SuperConference October 5, 6 & 7 in Buckhead, Georgia. And, um, you are one of many amazing speakers, but you are our keynote speaker and we are so super excited to have you and learning this type of material, what influences the brain, what influences our decisions, what creates the patient experience, what makes patients loyal, how to communicate more effectively, how to market with neuromarketing. These are the things you’re gonna wanna learn from Roger and gonna want to learn at SuperConference. So I hope we’ll see you there. Roger, any parting comments on your end?

No, I’m just honored to be part of the event and really look, looking forward to meeting our members there, Bob.

Well, thank you so much and again, so excited that you’re gonna be there. So excited that we’ve gotten to meet and so excited that you’ve influenced me so much with your teachings that I have now extrapolated and customized into the chiropractic world. Thank you so much, Roger.

Thank you, Bob.

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